How Boston was able to complete the BIG DIG Highway

It is an amazing feat to think that the Boston people were able to create an underground Highway. The project is one of the busiest highways in the world. The Boston Underground Highway is known as the Big Dig. It was one of the huge mega projects in Boston which is known as i93.

The main reason for doing this gigantic foundation project was to decrease the amount of traffic that was present on the i93 highway. Many hurdles in between such as the time duration and the investment needed to complete such a massive project. Eventually, the Big Dig project was completed in 2007. The plan was initially thought to be finished in 1998, so it was finished almost 9 years later.

Budget And Planning

During the planning, the Boston Architects and other people from across the world came together to implement this project. They initially thought that the budget would only cost 2.8 billion dollars at the time. It is even very costly by today’s standards. The final amount came out to be nearly 8 billion dollars. That converted into today’s economy translates to almost 21 billion dollars of expense for this massive project.

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But because of this big dig project, there has been a significant decrease in traffic. Nearly 62% of the traffic was gone due to this underground highway. So people saved nearly 5 to 6 hours of waiting in the traffic each day which is a huge success on their part. But people need to know that this project had a lot of problems in the beginning. The mayor hid the cost of the project details to the investors which caused a huge problem.

The big dig project director said, “This is the beginning of the end”. With the opening of the i93 highway, it was supposed to handle nearly 91000 cars a day which is a huge achievement compared to the original Road.

Original Plan

The actual plan of the project was also to improve the construction of a rail connection between two of the main train terminals of Boston. But this was never implemented because of the budget issues. This had been one of the most expensive projects in the USA at the time. It had many problems such as leaks and many delays.

This project also destroyed some lives in the process of its creation. In 2006 during the construction, a 3-ton slab fell on a motorist who died. Even out of the 21 billion dollar project, most of the payment has not been done. They expect to pay the whole amount by 2039.

Reason For This Project

The main reason for doing this project is because of the congested highways. It caused a lot of trouble for the people. There were almost 10 hours of traffic times which is almost 5 times the national average.

To compare the project cost with other major ones. The Airbus A380 development cost nearly 15 billion and the Large Hadron Collider cost nearly 6 billion dollars. That is much less compared to the cost of this huge project

Since the whole Highway was underground, the carbon monoxide levels in the city have also decreased by nearly 13%. During the peak of the construction times, nearly 5000 people were working on the site at almost 3 million dollars a day. The government was not able to handle all this burden and pressure. So they had to count investment from outside investors. Now they are slowly paying off the amount each year.

This was one of the longest projects in history. There were also rumors of a construction company that embezzled nearly 100 million in taxpayers’ money.

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